Why Bewdley mattered
Bewdley itself was not a prize. The bridge was. It was the only crossing of the Severn between Worcester and Bridgnorth, which made it the hinge of the whole region: whoever held it could move an army east or west and deny the same to the other side. For the eight years of fighting the town’s importance was entirely about that one structure.
The King’s men
Prince Rupert made his first entry into Bewdley in September 1643. The bells were rung for him and the town presented him with a hogshead of claret, which is either enthusiasm or insurance, and possibly both.
Charles I came the following summer. On Tuesday 11 June 1644 he arrived in Bewdley and stayed three days at Tickenhill, the old royal house on the hill above the town. He attended the service in the chapel where St Anne’s now stands, and the Bailiff’s own seat was set aside for him.
He was back a year later, on 17 and 18 June 1645, and on that visit he slept at the Angel. That was a fortnight after Naseby, with his field army destroyed and the war effectively lost, and he was moving through the Marches trying to raise more men. The Angel was rebuilt in 1938, so the building you see today is not the one he slept in, but the address is.
The bridge changes hands
On 3 September 1651 Cromwell destroyed the last royalist army at Worcester, eleven miles away. Charles II fled the field, and the immediate question was which roads he might take.
Major Mercer was sent with a strong party to take Bewdley bridge. Cromwell wrote to Parliament the next day that “I believe the forces that lay through providence at Bewdley were in a condition to intercept the flying enemy”. Richard Baxter, the minister at Kidderminster, left an account of that night from eleven miles up the road. He had just gone to bed when the noise of fleeing cavalry told him the battle was lost. A detachment from the troop guarding Bewdley bridge rode into Kidderminster and stood in the open market place, outside his door, to catch anyone passing. When hundreds of the fleeing army came through together, thirty troopers cried stand and opened fire, and in the dark the fugitives either ran or surrendered, having no idea how few men were challenging them. “Till midnight,” Baxter wrote, “the bullets flying towards my door and windows, and the sorrowful fugitives hasting by for their lives, did tell me the calamitousness of war.”
One Bewdley story from that night was still being told two hundred years later. An old woman told her neighbour that her grandfather had stood on Stagborough Hill and heard the noise of the battle at Worcester, and watched the royalists streaming away over Burlish Common.
What it cost the town
The bridge took a beating. At a meeting of the corporation on 6 June 1662 it was recorded that an arch had been broken down “in the time of the late warrs”, that repairing it would cost far more than the borough could bear on its own, and that a petition should be made at the sessions for help from the county.
Beyond that, remarkably little. Bewdley’s Victorian historian concluded that even the Civil War had little real impact on the town’s prosperity, and the trade of the river carried on through it. That is worth setting beside the royal visits: the King came twice and the town rang its bells, but the thing that actually mattered to Bewdley was that the boats kept moving.
Afterwards
In 1650, with the King executed and the Commonwealth established, tenpence was spent in the chapel on “putting out” the royal arms. In 1660, at the Restoration, they were put back up at a cost of two pounds ten shillings, and a new ring of bells was bought the same year.
The town’s own loyalties are best judged by the drink. When Oliver Cromwell died and his son Richard succeeded him, Bewdley Park was swept, five halberdiers and a trumpeter gave dignity to the proclamation, and the magistrates drank the new Protector’s health to the value of three pounds sixteen shillings. When Charles II was proclaimed a few months later, they got through twice as much, and four quarts of sack were given to the four ministers who preached.